"What are you made up for?" I asked. "Just been slopping around," he said, much too offhand to be truthful. He had the unmistakable air of having been caught at something, and I pressed the advantage.

"No kidding; what's the idea?"

I could see him hesitate for a choice of lies, and then a slow smile that meant surrender.

"You're not supposed to know," he said "but swear you'll keep it dark."

about the guy going crazy w or whatever it was?"

"Well, I got thinking about were away-not such a bad member-'better than a spe letter or the Western Union' see-this girl I used to kno was floundering a bit now. you know those verses the fel posed to sing "

I remembered them. "Well, this girl-she wrot I fixed up those words. She them-I haven't seen her f but I thought maybe she mig so just now-I-just befor in

The meaning of the cordur dawn on me, but I didn't Cary's sense of humor was quantity.

"You don't mean you sto Manning's stuff, and

"Well, not exactly. I any Italians, but I took t yours"

I couldn't resist any long down and laughed right at expected result, that his down like an asbestos curta

"Anyway," he said, "she' to tea to-morrow; that is, i up that mess on your table, necktie, and not try to be f I was used to these shifts they didn't worry me. "How did Mrs. Sidding by the way?"

"I'm not going to hand i "You see, if she-if this gi doesn't know the name I sig

and if she saw it, she mig where I got my idea; and thing I won't be accused imagination."

Thinking of the "saphea running wild with a harp, cious impulse.

"I'll grant you the imagin "but never influenced by su Cary stared at me with look.

"Not necessarily," he sa

The Epic Note

BY STRUTHERS BURT Author of "The Interpreter's House," etc.

spoke of heroes ultimately subject, no
matter how brave and heroic and clever
they were, to the dictates of an implaca-
ble and not to be understood fate and
constantly interfered with by the actions
of capricious and uncertain gods. One
could sacrifice to this fate and these gods,
and temporarily, perhaps, stave off mis-
fortune, but in the end fate and the gods
had their will. And virtue and heroism
had little to do with whether you were
fortunate or not. Hector, the most
charming of heroes, was slain miserably,
while Ulysses, sly and mean, got through
very nicely indeed. Although, one must
always remember that the primitive mind
regards cunning as a major virtue. In
most American Indian legends there is a
hero, most admired of all, distinguished
not for his fineness, but for his mincing
shrewdness, who beats the gods and fate,
until their final triumph, by being just a
trifle more sharp than they.

The primitive man was far too involved
with tribal laws and a confused mythol-
ogy and the exigencies of a constantly
perilous life to think in any other wise
than from the inside out. If he was not
constantly aware of himself he perished.
And the early epic was a patchwork of
personalities sewn, not self-consciously,
but as a matter of course, upon the dark
and shadowy curtain of existence and
destiny. And this exactly is what the
modern novel is becoming.

That the modern novelist is selfconscious concerning this dark and shadowy curtain, that he is acutely instead of implicitly aware of it, that he cries out against it and beats upon it, has little to do with the question. A sense of fate a little too large for the will of man, of a fate not at all to be dissected and tagged and numbered, an entirely different sense of fate from the one our immediate ancestors owned, has come back into the world. And this, following immediately upon the most gigantic flowering of the individualistic spirit, not even excepting the Renascence, history has known.

The men of to-day who have this sense of fate are the sons of men who thought they could twist events exactly to their liking and who, in their fiction at least, accepted the placid doctrine that if you were happy, and that if

you followed certain definite
end you were bound to be
They even imagined that th
crease in knowledge and me
vention gave them more ad
instead of, as such things a
least in the beginning, mere
the gap between what a man
what he must do.

But then decay invariably
final flowering, and one is av
forces of decay have for a lo
expanding side by side wit
The modern novelist k
that produced the last flamb
than to connect goodness an
He is more aware of the lac
of the old rules than all but
-Hardy, Meredith, and a fe
his predecessors. Or, at a
put the matter more truthfu
thought, the modern novel
these predecessors may ha
dares stick his tongue in h
cause his reading public 1
also. This reading public
what may possibly be true
that a man can, to a certain
his own life within the nar
know as life; but it is beginn
quite clearly that the origi
do any sort of forming is a
or, at least, of origins as
all the courage and goodnes
It knows, by this time de
does not necessarily imply
umph, for death, whatever it
tually, is no longer generally
as anything but a defeat p
defeat, that is, for all of thos
We know-and it is a
which physically we are ce
know, for it means honesty
an attempt to start at the
find a direct road-that wha
some day discover ourselve
present know nothing pq
that we are stones flung
whose plunge we can coun
hand into a pool, the nea
further. We can hope or
mise what we want, but we
Esthetically I am not
too honest to make statem
point of view where it a
That is another question.

in definite rules in the
und to be successful.
ned that their new in-
ge and mechanical in-
m more actual power,
h things always do, at
ning, merely widening
what a man can do and
invariably does follow a
d one is aware that the
ve for a long time been
y side with the forces
e last flamboyant effor..
novelist knows better
goodness and happiness
e of the lack of validity
han all but the greatest
th, and a few others-d

I

the vague impulses of his era, does form them into an image whose concreteness seems astonishing and new. Charles Reade, for instance, did not suddenly decide to change the prison system of England, but Charles Reade was sensitive enough to draw to himself the thoughts on the prison system of all forward-thinking Englishmen.

The novelist is a medium, not a spirit, and when this half-unconscious perceptiveness of his reaches a high state it appears so clairvoyant that, mistakenly, it is called genius. So, although this is merely repeating in a more decisive form what already has been said, not only are the novels of a period excellent evidence of what that period is subconsciously thinking, but the preoccupations of the men who write those novels add further clear-cut testimony.

am sorry, as a great many other people
must be, that the old type of tale, which
took the moral code for granted and went
on to unfold a plot, no longer has much
weight with the more thoughtful section
of the reading public. There is a great
deal to be said for George Moore's state-
ment that straight narration-story-tell-
ing-is the pure gold of literature, and it
is not at all certain that the function of
mere entertainment, of amusement, the
magic of a story for its own sake, is not
a much more dignified function than
present-day critics would have us be-
lieve. At least, as a writer, I know some-
thing most critics apparently do not, and
that is that it is much more difficult to
weave a tale, to produce this magic, than
it is to indulge in fairly interesting social
comment. As to great social comment,
say nothing. And it would seem, more
over, that the place of relaxation, of the
magic carpet, of re-creation, in the original
sense of the word, should become increas-
ingly important, instead of less important,
practically if in no other way, as life grows
more disturbing and complex. Of one
thing, at all events, we can be sure, and
that is that the present critical attitude
toward Stevenson and Kipling, and even
Richard Harding Davis-any of the great
tale-tellers-is beneath contempt. Nor is
the function of form, even for its own
sake, to be disregarded by any but the
stupid and ignorant. We are in a hurry
to get somewhere and we haven't time to
listen to anything except what we think is
worth while, but we must therefore be all
the more careful to know what is worth
while.

Or, at all events, to more truthfully, whatever rs may have privately dern novelist no longer ongue in his cheek, be ig public knows better ing public still believes oly be true, and that is to a certain extent, for in the narrow circle we it is beginning to realise it the original ability to orming is a blind force origins as yet unknown. his time definitely, th nd goodness in the world arily imply ultimate tr whatever it may be spi er generally looked up a defeat physically. A or all of those triumphs ar we are certain. id it is a fine thing is honesty of purpose ! art at the beginning and I-that whatever we er ourselves to be, we nothing positively, sam nes flung by some g ol, the nearer ripples e can count but not n hope or believe or nt, but we are becomi

ments.

These, however, are side issues, and, no matter what we think, the fact remains that the novel of ideas is the most typical novel of to-day and is the novel that most thoughtful novelists want to write.

Now novelists are not sui generis, they do not spring full-armed from their own personalities in any Minerva-like natal acrobatics. More than any other artist, between them and the world there exist the closest of actions and reactions. The statement that the great novelist is ahead of his times is not true. No novelist has ever been or can be ahead of his timesno man can be ahead of his times-but

It is the age, then, that is producing the novel of ideas and the men who want to write these novels, that is more interesting than the novels themselves. And you will forgive me if, in trying to arrive at my point, or rather, at a final proof of my point, I recall some exceedingly wellknown facts.

Primitive man saw himself a very small, unprotected creature in a large and hostile and mysterious universe, and the same impulse which drove him, a sea creature, to the shore bade him set about as speedily as possible making himself comfortable, physically and mentally, in this forbidding environment. He began to invent and discover things to protect and please his body, and he began to explain things to protect and comfort his mind. And through the latter the great human ability for rationalism began. A man was struck by lightning and it was not enough to know that he had been struck by lightning, it began to be necessary to know why he was struck. A whole chain of events was constructed and it was decided that on the preceding Tuesday, often quite innocently, the victim had in some way or other displeased the gods. The simple faith that the gods were hidden and inscrutable and responsible only to themselves grew into the much more complex faith that both they and men were bound by the laws of cause and ef

effect are, at their extremities, far beyond
the restricted vision of humanity, one
finished off these extremities neatly with
what one desired and what one dreamt.
Now the attempt to find the cause of
things is, of course, the most valuable
impulse man has. Through it, all knowl-
edge has been achieved and all progress
made, but, like every other valuable thing,
it is at the same time dangerous as well,
especially in such vague fields as those of
morals and religion; and most of the non-
sense in the world has come from the at-
tempts of the ignorant to discover the
causes of things with the resultant assign-
ing of wrong causes-comes, that is, from
using the blunt side of a weapon that in
the hands of scientists or wise men has been
the sharpest weapon man has ever pos-
sessed. Sometimes this is done by super-
stition; sometimes it is done, to change the
figure, by the familiar process of putting
the cart before the horse; sometimes it is
done merely by a break in logic.

Rightly or wrongly, however, directly
or haltingly, man did manage to make
himself fairly comfortable spiritually and,
before long, he found himself in a period
that was to last for many centuries; to
last, indeed, up to the end of the century
we have just left; to last, one might even
more justly say, in the general accepta-
tion of its point of view, up to the close
of the Great War. Now, like some wide
and sheltering cloud that has hung above
a landscape, this comfortable point of
view is dispersing, blowing away, being
torn-and the process accelerates-into
shreds, and a strange sun is peeping
through. Whether this sun is too direct
for the weak heads of men, whether undi-
luted sunlight is a good thing in any event,
I do not know, but that the sun is here
seems fairly certain.

Therefore, by one of those super-para-
doxes that are the quintessence of truth,
humanity has swung around a gigantic
circle and spiritually is back very much
where its ancestors of two or three thou-
sand years ago were. Not exactly in the
same spot, for history does not repeat it-
self in that way, but in the same general
neighborhood. History is not a series of
concentric circles, but a series of bisecting
circles, each succeeding circle at a slightly
imilar one which it

bisects. The circumference
much the same, but the plan
If this were not so, then th
We know more than our
no human progress whatsoe
cestors did, we are perhaps a
fitted to cope with our prob
perhaps not quite so easil
but in the same ancient fund
find ourselves once more ju
as they and, to these fund
have added a whole new wo
ment of our own invention a
Indeed, and this is the huge
joke, it has been this world
and discovery that has sent
ing and afraid, to have anoth
fundamentals. We are begi
but surely, to know too mu
thing but simple. From t
point of view which appr
truth because it knew so
devious route we have arriv
therefore know little wrong,
approximation of truth whe
enough to know we know pr
ing at all. And humblenes
ning of all honest endeavor
to be ready to start on a stra
By his own efforts, by h
to be in the middle of a bl
eries, by his searching for t
at last pulled down abou
elaborate and supposedly
structure it took him ages
stands among the ruins, al
fenseless, but eager to bu
stronger edifice. The co
that rapid communication,
the airplane, the motor-ca
eries of the spirit and th
made the world smaller is,
world, instead of growing
mon sayings, far from th
grown, physically and s
nitely larger. When you
encircling rim of a myste
Struggling to make hin
widen the circumference.
ble in the beginning, man
gan by dignifying the indiv
that is-the ego. And h
well that for something li
turies the point of view th
centre of the universe w
one. It is still the popula